While I agree that continued fear is an overreaction, I think you are missing the underlying point by referring to it as a feature you don't have to use.
Static cruise control is a perfectly valid way to do very active driving, and it is more effective than active speed control in certain very common contexts.
I love driving, and I loved driving my '09 Outback XT, including on the highway. Most of the time, the way I drove on the highway was to set the cruise control speed to the speed I wanted to go - typically 15mph over the speed limit. Then I would drive foot-free, passing cars as they got in my way - often quite frequently. It was relatively rare that there wasn't a path at my current speed, and when there was, my hand was already on the wheel. I could tweak my speed by a couple mph with just a thumb flick, to address a temporary condition.
Active speed control is for when your speed requirements and options are changing more often than they are staying the same. When requirements only change infrequently, it is more effective to have an interface that only requires input when you want something different than what you wanted before. Teslas effectively don't have this.
No, you don't have to use it, but we do lack a tool that does what we want, that nearly all other cars have. It's sort of like how you can use a almost anything as a hammer when you don't have a hammer. A hammer is better at hammering than anything else. This particular hammer would be free for Tesla to give us, and there is no good reason for why they instead only give us this other hammer-like thing that frequently misses or bends the nail, and smashes somebody's thumb a lot more often than a plain old static dumb hammer.
